868 karma · joined June 21, 2024
Mostly because the USSR was the new enemy and Germany had to be an ally after WW2.
While the war was still ongoing there was carpet-bombing of German civilians, and some of the plans for after the war originally included complete destruction of industrial capacities, forced displacement of the population of formerly industrialized areas and forced labour for the whole population (google Morgenthau plans).
In any case, the non-voters are OK with whatever party might win, because otherwise they should have made their vote or created a political party that might be agreeable to them.
Tales from an insider don't help very much, because people will only report about their own bubble, the city/province/town they live in, their family and friends of similar interest and social status, their workplace, etc. Also, there can be a severe selection bias, people wanting to talk to outsiders on the internet or even leave a country are probably more often critical of a regime and its decisions.
So from the outside, the only sensible thing we can do is see the country as a whole, lump in the government with the people. Because we cannot really know if people think differently and who they are. We cannot isolate or punish "just the government". And if there were a majority against the current government, there would be a revolution at some point. If there isn't one, opposition against the regime just isn't strong enough.
However, the pratical evidence is to the contrary, AI companies are hammering every webserver out there, ignoring any kind of convention like robots.txt, re-downloading everything in pointlessly short intervals. Annoying everyone and killing services.
Just a few recent examples from HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45260793 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45226206 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45150919 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42549624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43476337 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35701565
Active Directory is just not developed anymore, its basically abandonware that everyone still uses. The new hot stuff is the Azure AD/Entra ID bastardization of Web Auth plus AD that they try to upsell people to.
However, keytab usage is rare in the Windows AD world because people don't seem to comprehend what a keytab is and does, and why it is far better than using passwords for services.
With pure offshoring, you do have control over who you pick, what their mode of work is, whom to fire, etc.
With outsourcing to offshore, the local company hires people, usually on the cheap, to only just fullfill your contract and no more. If people underperform, you may complain, and maybe they'll be moved to a less prominent and visible role, or maybe they'll be shuffled to the next customer of theirs. So things will be bad, because it is not in the interest of the local company to do one iota more than necessary. And you'll still have to have your own QA, architects, etc., to make sure you at least get what you paid for.
So after the appeals, the ruling will be even more toothless than it already is...
That's why you just avoid dealing with the police if at all possible.
The EU isn't a democracy, it is actually governed by backroom deals between member states' governments.
Actually I think that that's even a fallacy. More data means more stuff to sift through, more false leads in there, more things to follow up. Watch an episode of House M.D. about full-body-scans in medicine: useless, because only wasted time to follow up on every blotch in the scan.
Every request by law enforcement must be opposed. Do not talk to cops. Do not give them an inch. Ever.
They are insatiable and power-hungry. Nothing will suffice. A police state will still be a million police officers and some stricter laws short.
So it's not just a matter of taste, humanities are a cult.
Which means that humanities cannot be important to mankind as a whole, because most won't appreciate them, as they are a matter of taste. And they are as arbitrary as other matters of taste, lacking the universality that is necessary for usefulness. Good riddance!
But where are your arguments, and where is your evidence? Or should I derive from this that all arguments in the humanities boil down to name-calling?
And without the DRM, lockdown and prosecution demands of Hollywood, the internet would indeed be a better, freer place.
Chomsky is one I grant you, he was influential in both computer science as well as linguistics. But his success in linguistics was even more revolutionary than his influence on CS, exactly because he introduced abstraction, rigor and various ideas from computer science and mathematics into linguistics.
Yes, if you go back to antiquity, there were only philosophy and religion. Science and mathematics were once sub-branches of philosophy. But that's a few thousand years before the internet, and the renaissance at the latest was where philosophy was fully separate from sciences and mathematics.
This decline of rigor in the humanities means that they no longer really teach logic, critical thinking, or any kind of reality-related ideas. What they do is arbitrary and therefore objectively pointless, except maybe to further some political or social goal. That those goals are mostly left-wing is imho just an accident, they could as well be promoting right-wing politics.
(In a similar manner, arts now reject their original goals of beauty, aesthetics, depictions of reality, mastery and entertainment. But that's less of a problem, because arts have always been even less important than humanities.)